Deep into researching a novel about sleep, dreaming, and consciousness, I found out that I was pregnant.

I had always wanted to do these two things: to write books and to have children. But now that it was happening — my body busy building a child while my mind was busy constructing my second book — I was not at all sure how the combination would go, or what one pursuit might cost the other.

There’s a familiar idea in our culture that working too much is bad for a woman’s children, but there’s a newer idea, too: that having children might be bad for one’s work. Sheila Heti’s Motherhood captures this bleak anxiety here: “It suddenly seemed like a huge conspiracy to keep women in their ’30s — when you finally have some brains and some skills and experience — from doing anything useful with them at all.”...